


Portal/Borderlands: When Claptrap Met GLaDOS

by iammemyself



Series: Love as a Construct [6]
Category: Borderlands (Video Games), Poker Night 2, Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-18
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-08-04 02:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16338470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iammemyself/pseuds/iammemyself
Summary: If he’d known what he’d be getting into… he would’ve done it all over again.





	1. Chapter 1

**Portal/Borderlands: When Claptrap Met GLaDOS**

**Characters: Claptrap, GLaDOS [ClapDOS]**

**Setting: During the first Portal 2 DLC/after Borderlands 2 (pre Love as a Construct for most of it)**

**Synopsis: If he’d known what he’d be getting into… he would’ve done it all over again.**

**Note: I know my fics are usually soundly under the banner of a PG or even a K rating, but please keep in mind Claptrap is from an M-rated game.  I did my best to keep him from getting too gross.**

 

 

 

She’d given him a map.

The whole thing was nuts, really.  He’d accepted an invitation for some weird-ass interdimensional poker game just so he’d have something to _do_ for a few hours and, when he got there, stuff was pretty standard.  Steroid freak, guy covered in blood, a dog and a rabbit, some shadowy thing.  Also, Moxxi was there.  No matter where you went, Moxxi was always there to sling you an overpriced cocktail or two.  Well, not him.  She didn’t serve _him_ anymore.  But all of that was pretty standard stuff.  The _really_ nutso thing about it all was the dealer.

The dealer was a robot.  A _female_ robot.  A _sexy_ female robot.

And _what_ a sexy female robot she was!  One eye set off-centre on her head, half-open case, and _super_ hot.  She seemed to be a fixed model, permanently attached to the ceiling and with limited range of movement, but hey.  That was about the only thing _not_ in her favour.  And really, he could work with that.  Her chassis was definitely custom, nothing mass produced, and it looked like it had been through something or another but that didn’t take away from its hotness at _all_.  Even if it had, she had a _voice_ on her that _more_ than made up for it.  She was doing her best to be all _emotionless_ and _impartial_ , but c’mon.  You couldn’t pull a fast one on a fellow AI!  She had emotional software.  She just didn’t want to use it in front of a bunch of strangers, which was _more_ than fair.  Humans got freaked out when robots got all emotional and stuff.  He could _definitely_ think of something to do with _her_.

 _If_ she gave him a shot, that was.  It had been… well, a while since Claptrap had managed _that_.  But while she was dealing out the first hand he had a minute to mull it over, and if there’d ever been a time where he had _nothing_ to lose it was _right now._   She didn’t know _zip_ about him!  All he had to do was make his move before she had time to decide he was annoying, and since that could be literally at any moment he’d have to do it soon.  Which he did.  And he didn’t really get an answer.  Which was fine.  A little disappointing, but oh well.  He’d tried.  He’d go back home and be a little sad about it for a while and… maybe some other things, but that was it. 

Except… it hadn’t been.  Right when he’d been about to leave she’d given him a piece of paper – paper!  Who used _that_ anymore, right?  Especially for _maps_ – and told him to be in a certain place at a certain time the next day if he wanted to know what he’d find after he followed the directions.

Well.  _That_ sure sounded like an offer.  And one he couldn’t refuse! 

So here he was.  With the map.  In some kinda… well, he had no idea.  It was dark.  Very grey.  He looked down at the sheet of paper in his hand.  Wherever she was, it was pretty far from where he’d been reconstituted.  Was this some kinda test?  Why else would she zap him so far away from… he zoomed in on his destination.  It was some kinda circular room separated from everything else by a rectangular block.  Probably a bridge, but he’d find out when he got there.

Well, if he was ever planning on passing a test, this would be a good one to start with!

There was absolutely _nothing_ to look at in this place.  It was just endless grey _everywhere_.  The only break in the boringness of it all was the cameras bolted near the ceiling, and they were all facing the floor.  He was beginning to think this hadn’t been one of his better ideas.  This was looking like some sort of prank that was going to inevitably end in his humiliation at the hands of someone who thought brutal torture was funny.  Which it _was,_ sometimes, but boy was he _not_ looking forward to being the recipient again anytime soon.

Eventually he got to the rectangle on the map, which was indeed a bridge! but thing was he could see _down_ the bridge and into the room it opened to, and something wasn’t sitting quite right.  It was obviously the _place_ , but… that robot was _wayyyy_ bigger than the one he’d gotten this map from.  And if Claptrap knew anything, it was to be wary of big robots.  They usually had big guns.  Or, worse, big _brains_.  Not that he didn’t _appreciate_ a smart girl!  He did!  But his luck with them was… well, if there was a word that was like _nonexistent_ but times a million to the power of a googol, that would be the word he’d be using right now.

He put the map back in his storage drive and inched his way down the bridge.  Ohhhh boy.  That was her all right, but at _least_ four times bigger.  She must’ve tapped out at about forty feet and her head alone was worth two or three of him.  And he was into that.  He really was.  But it… meant things, and she didn’t look made for combat, so that only left… administration.

There were _places_ in the world for a robot.  About three of them, in fact.  Drones, stewards, and administrators.  Drones were super basic AI that did just about what you told ‘em to do and that was it.  Most of _those_ bots back on Pandora were combat models, though there was still the odd surveyor around if you looked hard enough.  Then there were bots like Claptrap: helpers, with enough intelligence to not have to have their hands held through the stuff they were asked to do, but not enough for them to make trouble.  Though that had never really stopped him!  Stuff just kinda _happened_ when he was around.  There weren’t that many stewards around anymore, but there were even _less_ admin bots.  In fact, there were so few of them he didn’t know if any even _existed._   They weren’t usually put inside of a chassis, instead contained to the system they were supposed to be controlling.  Kept ‘em from stirring up their own kinds of trouble.  Which brought him right back to the bot he was standing just out of sight of right now.

Claptrap was… well, if there’d been a robot totem pole he’d’ve been riiiiight at the bottom.  And not just because he was vaguely square-shaped and easily stackable.  Nah.  He was just not that _smart_.  Oh, he could _think_ , but trouble was his programming was such a disaster his thoughts kinda just wandered off into places nobody really wanted them to go.  His intentions were good!  Really!  But the results were usually preeeetty messy.  Not anything an admin bot would want to deal with.  And all signs were pointing to this GLaDOS chick being a very smart, very hot, very out-of-his-league artificial intelligence. 

There was always the chance this bot _wasn’t_ her, and the bot he had met was just a smaller version of _this_ bot.  Yeah!  Yeah, that was it!  Alright.  He still had a chance here.  He’d just ask _this_ bot where GLaDOS was, and then he’d go find her.  Kinda weird how the map didn’t actually lead to _her_ , but the mind of an admin bot was beyond him.  Literally.  He didn’t have that kind of architecture.

So into the next room he went, and it was just as boring as all the rest of the place.  It was just a cylinder lined with more of the drab grey panels, except that these ones were tilted at an angle so he could see the mechanical arms they were mounted on.  Each of them had a light just underneath the edge of the panel that glowed a cool white.  The bot was in the very centre, and tracing his eye up the chassis across from him led up to a thick collection of wires disappearing into a series of massive rings that rotated _really_ slowly.  That was… old.  Were they still using HDDs down here?  Did those things even _count_ as HDDs?

The bot was looking at him.  Oh, right.  Right.  He’d gotten distracted.  Again.  Geez.  Even the bot’s _eye_ was huge.  Whoever had built it had made it ridiculously complicated, too.  You could probably configure actual facial expressions with that thing.  Or eyeball expressions, anyway.  He started to wonder if it was better to have arms or an eye with which to articulate yourself when he realised he was _still_ being stared at.  Oh, right!  Right.  He _really_ needed to work on paying attention to stuff.

“Uh… I’m trying to find GLaDOS,” he said, his voice a bit smaller than he’d wanted it to be.  Or maybe it just _seemed_ smaller, since this room was so big.  The robot in front of him tilted its head and said, in what was definitely the voice he remembered,

“What?  Did you forget what I look like already?”

Man.  It was even _better_ in person.  He wasn’t even sure if it was coming from her chassis or somewhere else in the room because it was just as big as the rest of her.  Not _loud_ , but… _there._   _Everywhere_.

It was _really_ sexy.

“… no,” he said, suddenly wondering if he could handle this.  “You’re just uh… way bigger than I thought you were.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

Her voice had cooled a little bit, which was definitely not the direction he wanted this to go.  He held up his hands in surrender.  “No!  No, of course not!  I just.. wasn’t expecting it.  I’ve only seen like one other bot this big and he was uh… there wasn’t much to him.  Other than like… turrets.  And rockets.  Whole lotta rockets.”

“I have those, but not on me at the moment,” GLaDOS said, immediately raising her hotness level to new heights.  If she had _those_ she was tougher than she looked.  Also, what the hell was her function?  Why would an admin bot have stuff like _that_?

It didn’t take him long to figure out that GLaDOS was not only no ordinary admin bot, but _nothing_ like any bot he knew.  For one thing, she didn’t seem to know anything about interfacing.  At all.  She was quite _curious_ about it and at no point told him to back off, but she seemed super surprised about the end result.  Which was better than he usually got, so he wasn’t gonna _complain_ about it.  But it was _weird._

She just kind of started staring at the wall with her eye narrowed a little bit, and he wasn’t sure if he should say something or offer to go home or what.  He was actually starting to worry he’d taken advantage of her by mistake, which he had _totally_ not meant to do.  Was she mad about that?  Or had he just been even worse than usual?  In his defense, it was hard to figure out what he was supposed to _do_ when _she_ didn’t even seem to know.  She looked over at him slowly, and he was beginning to get freaked out when she asked, with genuine curiosity, “Was that supposed to happen?”

Was _what_ supposed to… how should _he_ know?  They were _entirely different models_ , why would –

Oh _s***._   Had he.  He had to have.  He’d gotten her off!  He’d actually gotten her off!

Now he _knew_ she had never done this before.

“Yeah,” he said, once he realised he kinda had to provide an answer.  “’course.”

“Huh,” she said.  “I didn’t expect that.”

“What… what _were_ you expecting?”

“That was the experiment.”  Her eye seemed more intent, suddenly, and he had the sudden urge to back up _really_ far.  “We’ll have to conduct it again sometime.”

Wait.  What?  Was his auditory processing on the fritz again?  “Really?” he blurted out.  “You want to do it again?”

“Why?  Are you only able to do that once?”

“No!” he protested.  “Of course not!  I just uh… people don’t usually say that to me.”

“It wouldn’t be a very good experiment if I only performed it once.”

She was really going for it with the whole _science_ metaphor, huh.  Well, okay.  He wasn’t one to judge.  Whatever it took.  “You’re absolutely right, honey-RAM.  So um… can I get your email?  So I can… we can meet up again sometime?”

“My what?” GLaDOS asked.

“Your… email?”

She looked at him kinda sideways, an impressive feat considering she didn’t have peripheral vision.  “I don’t know what that is.”

“You know!  That thing you use to send private messages over the ECHONet?”

“I don’t see an ECHONet in the database,” she answered after a moment.  “We have an _Inter_ net.  Is it like that?”

“Uh…”  Crap.  Culture barrier!  “Show it to me.”

So she displayed the entry on a screen and presented it to him, and it seemed kinda archaic but along the right lines.  “It’s _kinda_ like that.  This stuff looks… old.  You can get the ECHONet from anywhere in the system of Pandora, but _this_ stuff looks _super_ short-range.  And _slow_.”

“We don’t have Internet anymore, anyway,” GLaDOS told him, removing the monitor.  “All of the servers went down after the humans were killed.  There are a still few online, but there isn’t much on them.”

“There’s _lots_ of stuff on the ECHONet,” Claptrap said.  “I still get it out here, so _you_ probably could if I tracked you down an ECHO device!”  And he did, even though the signal was kinda crappy.  But that might just’ve been his receiver acting up again.

“Do that, then.”

Well, that was practically an _invitation_ to come back.

 

//

It wasn’t for several visits that Claptrap realised he just might have been in over his chassis on this one.

She liked to talk, but she didn’t really say anything about herself.  About all he knew for longer than he probably should have was that she spent all of her spare time doing something called ‘testing’ (testing _what_ he still didn’t know) and she really didn’t know anything about interfacing, which was an _awesome_ surprise.  She’d figure out that _he_ didn’t really know that much about it either, but for now it felt pretty good to be the guy who knew something for once.  And all of that was _super_ fun, when it wasn’t awkward, but he didn’t want to be _that guy_.  Especially when things were looking this good.  So sometimes he just talked instead, which she seemed not to mind, but he didn’t just want to talk to _himself_.  He could do that any day!  And he did!  But he didn’t want to do that while he was over there with her.

For a girl who lived by herself she sure had a lot of work to do, and one day he was passing the time by rolling idly through the labs, waiting for her to wrap that up, when it occurred to him to ask, “Hey, GLaDOS.”

“ _Yes?_ ”

“Just how big is this place?”

“ _I’m actually not certain.  I know it goes down to about sixty thousand feet, but as for the breadth of it, that has been lost to me.  At the moment, anyway.  I’ll get around to finishing the map.  It’s just not that important at the moment.”_

Sixty k feet deep was… pretty big.  He paused in running his hand along the wall.  “Who else is here?”

“ _Hm?_ ”

“Usually with a place this big there’ll be a few different bots keeping track of it all, y’know?  Where are they?”

“ _There is no one else._ ”

He dropped his hand to his side and stared up at the nearest camera, which somehow regarded him with impassive curiosity.  He had _no idea_ how she did that.  “You run this whole place _by yourself_.”

“ _It’s what I was built to do.  So yes._ ”

Claptrap had to look away even though the eye watching him just then kinda wasn’t her.  Oh no.  Oh no no no.  

GLaDOS was an _upper-tier_ administration bot _._   So why was he even _here_?  What the hell would _she_ want with a _steward_ bot?

Unless… unless she didn’t _know_ he was a steward bot.  Or maybe she didn’t know the difference between admin and helper bots.  Maybe they didn’t have that here.  Yeah.  Yeah!  That was it!  There were no other bots here, she’d just said that herself!  All right.  Okay.  Everything was fine.  She was a little – okay, a lot – okay, he should never have been anywhere _near_ her for _any_ reason whatsoever – she was completely and totally out of his league, but she didn’t _know_ that.  He still had a chance.  He just had to not completely blow it.  For once.

“Oh.  That’s cool,” he said, hoping he sounded normal.  “Oh!  Almost forgot!  I picked up that ECHO for ya!  Would’ve done it sooner, but people kept giving me broken ones.  Probably as a joke!  You know how humans are when you ask ‘em for something.  Always such kidders.”

_“You give them too much credit.”_

He kinda _had_ to, or he’d be even more of a useless steward than he already was, but he was putting off explaining any of that to her.  He wasn’t gonna bring up the massive difference between them until she did. 

When he gave her the ECHO she spent a long time inspecting it.  Like a _really_ long time.  She went so far as to _take it apart_ , study all of the pieces, and then put it back together again.  He was standing far enough back that she couldn’t see him while she was doing it, so he just watched her and wondered the kinds of things that were running through that brain of hers.  _He_ could’ve stared at that thing for _years_ and it never would’ve made any sense to him.  But she was _making_ it make sense.  Somehow.  Even though she’d never seen it before.

“I’m going to need the codebase for this,” she said finally.  “I know how it works, but I’m not going to be able to use it without writing compatibility software.”

“Oh,” Claptrap said, wishing he’d thought of that.  He would’ve seemed smarter.  “Uhhh… I think I’ve got that somewhere, but I’m gonna have to use the ECHO to show it to you.  Until you – wait.  Who’s writing the software?  You said there was no one else here.”

“Is that a trick question?”

They just stared at each other for a minute or two, and then Claptrap said in confusion, “You mean _you’re_ gonna write it?”

“Of course I am.”

“You’re… you’re gonna learn the language this thing runs on and write compatibility software for it _right now_?”

She sighed and looked back at the ECHO.  “I can’t figure out if _all_ robots on Pandora are this stupid or if it’s just you.”

Ohhhh no.  Oh no no no.  Not now!  Not yet!  “Well, I mean – I’m sure _lots_ of people can do that, it’s just… uh… _I_ can’t.  I’m uh… not built for that.  But I’m sure you can!  You seem like the kind of person who –“

“Are you going to show me the codebase or not?”

“Yeah!  Lemme track it down.”

She hadn’t been reading it for more than a few minutes before she shook her head.  “It’s so strange,” she murmured.  “All of this is… the same, but different.”

“Is it?”  He’d never tried programming _or_ building stuff.  Too many rules for him to keep track of. 

“Mm.  This is almost the same as one I know.  This shouldn’t take me too long.”

That was when he suddenly remembered something, and he jumped in between her and the device, and when she narrowed her optic at him he realised that was _kinda_ rude.  But this was important.  “Don’t connect to it before you’ve got yourself an antivirus!  ECHONet’s _swarming_ with malware.  Most of it’s pretty harmless, as long as you don’t mind ignoring popups.”

“I’d rather not,” GLaDOS said.  “Show me some.”

“Some… popups?”  Why would she want to see _those_?  They were kinda hard to avoid.  Despite a guy’s best efforts they usually slipped through the cracks.  She looked at him tiredly.

“Claptrap.  Seriously.”

“Ohhhh.  The _antiviruses_.  Yeah.  I knew that.”  He pulled up a few of those on the ECHO and she looked at them, though not for very long.

“All right,” she said after about twenty minutes.  “Let’s see if this works.”

He _really_ hoped whatever she’d done worked, because being downed by a virus was, like, the _worst_ way to lose a girlfriend.

“Oh,” she said, a little faintly.  “There is a _lot_ on here.”

“Oh yeah,” Claptrap said, “It’s not _regulated_ or anything so pretty much _everything_ you can think of gets dumped up there.”  He did his best to show her the major places, once she’d worked out how to connect him to her monitors that was, but they got stuck pretty early on because of the cat videos.  He’d meant to show her just _one_ but before he could work out where they should go next she said, in a really cute, delighted sort of way, “You have _cats_?”

“Um… _we_ don’t.  One of the nearby planets has ‘em.  People’ve _tried_ to bring cats to Pandora, buuuuut… they don’t last very long.”

“I haven’t seen a cat in a _long_ time,” GLaDOS said.  “I don’t know if we still have them, either.  Well.  Other than the ones in the cat graveyard, that is.”

He didn’t know if he wanted to ask about that. 

Well, watching cat videos wasn’t such a bad way to spend an evening.  He had a playlist of his favourite ones, which she seemed very happy about, but at one point his luck ran out and the next video on the list was interrupted by an ad, which he hastily had to mute before it blew their mics out.  “Sorry,” Claptrap said, cringing a little bit.  “I can’t block ads from Hyperion.  It’s a – “

But to his total surprise she actually leaned closer to the screen.  “What _is_ that?”

“Uh… do you not have DRAM here?”

“That isn’t DRAM,” she said, as though she were insulted he thought that would satisfy her.  “I _know_ what DRAM is and that is _not_ it.”

“Yes it is!” Claptrap insisted, though there was a second or two there he wasn’t sure because she was just _so_ confident about it.  “It must just look different from yours.”

“Is there somewhere I can see more of it?”

“Well, yeah, there’s lots of…”  Of all the things to want to look at.  But they weren’t busy so he put her on the relevant Hyperion product page and the look that came over her was… strange.  He’d never seen anybody so mesmerised by _DRAM_ before.  It was just a stick of memory!  Sure, a lot of them had pretty dope heatsinks or came in nice colours, but –

Hoooooly crap.  Wait.  He _knew_ that look.

She had a _thing_ for DRAM.

He glanced back at the screen, wondering what to do with this information.  It wasn’t like he could _ask_ her about it – and how was he supposed to, anyway, if she had no idea herself what was going on? – but if he wasn’t _totally_ misinterpreting this he’d stumbled across something that could be a _lot_ of fun.  “There are tons of other kinds,” he said, though he wasn’t sure she was listening.  What he would have _done_ to know what was going through her mind!  “From different manufacturers.”

“Show me,” she said, a little distantly, and he did, watching her as best he could without being super obvious about it.  He took her on a quick tour of the other components available on Pandora, or at least he _tried_ to.  She never seemed to want to move on from the specs of whatever they were looking at.  She was _fascinated_ by how small all the parts apparently were and, though she seemed delighted by the mere existence of it all (which was _super cute_ ), she didn’t react to anything else the way she had to the DRAM. 

It was… really sort of adorable.  He found himself not _wanting_ to do anything with the knowledge.  She didn’t understand what the heck was going on when she looked at it and… well, maybe he should just leave it at that.  Did she really _need_ to know?  There’d been _plenty_ of times _he’d_ wished he didn’t know anything about _that_ particular… feature.

The question was answered for him when she said, while he was leaving, “Bring some of that DRAM with you next time.  I want to see it for myself.”

“Uh… is that a good idea?”

“Is there a reason it wouldn’t be?”

And that was when Claptrap had to explain to her what a fetish was and what that _meant_ , exactly, and whoo boy.  _Not_ as fun as you’d think.  But when he’d somehow gotten through his explanation she said only, “You made that sound like it was a bad thing.”

He was thrown for a for-loop for a second.  Huh.  She was right.  And… it kinda wasn’t.  Being into DRAM wasn’t _illegal_ or _bad_ or even that crazy.  It was certainly super vanilla from _his_ point of view.  And even if people back on Pandora liked to give him crap for this sort of stuff, this _wasn’t_ Pandora.  This was Aperture, and the only rules were hers. 

And she didn’t _have_ any rules.  Not for this.

“It’s… not,” he said, less than convincingly.  “I just uh… wanted to make sure you knew what was going on.  I wouldn’t want to uh… to take advantage of you.”

“Trust me when I say that would be beyond you,” GLaDOS told him, with a quite sexy self-assurance, but for this one thing he was gonna have to keep in mind she didn’t really know what she was talking about.

 

//

 

He didn’t see her again for a couple days, which sucked more than he’d thought it was going to.  The next time he did was the next poker game, and she didn’t ask him to come over after.  He really, really wanted to, but he didn’t want to push it.  He was doing such a good job of _not_ pushing it!  This went on for the next three games, but at the third one it hit him how bad he missed talking to her and he just _went_ for it.  He asked how she was doing, but in binary instead of English because she was weird about admitting they were hanging out in front of the other losers, and to his total surprise she answered him _immediately._

Ohhhhh.  She’d been waiting on him to make a move!  He should’ve figured _that_ out.  He’d seen enough romcoms!

Transmitting in binary meant some pretty instant convos, but somehow they didn’t run into any awkward silences.  GLaDOS was a champ at pretending nothing affected her in any way, ever, but at some point she found something Claptrap said _so_ funny that she started laughing _out loud_ and forgot to deal the river.   He sure wished he’d been keeping track of what he’d been saying because _that_ was _super_ adorable.

“Is there something happening over there we should know about?” Sam asked, eyes peering out from beneath the big blue hat that Claptrap _really_ wanted to borrow.  Brock rolled his eyes and said around his cigarette,

“Don’t bother.  Their kind gets a kick out of doing shit like that.  Makes ‘em think they’re better than us.”

“But we _are_ better than you,” Claptrap protested, glancing at his cards without paying attention to them.  “That’s like… a fact!”

 _Don’t_ , GLaDOS advised him.  _They don’t get it._

_Don’t get what, sugar-RAM?_

_Being the only one_.

It wasn’t for a while that he realised _he_ didn’t really get it, either.  Sure.  He was the last of his kind.  But he hadn’t _always_ been.  He used to talk to other CL4P-TPs in binary _all the time_!  But there was only ever one of her.  And that was all there was ever _supposed_ to have been.  He could go find a Loader if he was _really_ down and out.  But she couldn’t.

Geez.  That made him _sad_. 

 _Can I come over after_? he asked, before he really thought about it, and he was already feeling that cringey-ness that came with him getting too clingy but she said,

_What took you so long?_

_Oh, you know.  Absence makes the… uh… whatever that saying is._

_Very smooth.  Yes.  But only for a little bit.  It will be late by then._

That was what she _said_ , and she _also_ said they weren’t going to be fooling around but that actually did happen.  He couldn’t and _wouldn’t_ argue about _that_ , but he did have to ask her why she’d changed her mind. 

“I wanted to continue the experiment,” she answered.

So she was still going with that, eh?  All right.  He could probably use more details.  “So uh… what _is_ this experiment you’re doing?”

“You,” she said, and he was about to congratulate her on such a clever answer when she went on, “You’re the experiment.”

“Um,” was all he managed to generate.

“I’ve never had a boyfriend before.”

“You _haven’t_?” Claptrap exclaimed, just about blowing a fuse in surprise.  How in the _world_ did you _avoid_ having one with a chassis like _that_?  She shook her core.

“No.”

“But… you’re so pretty!”

The way she looked at him didn’t make any sense.  She almost seemed… _confused_.  Maybe she’d never been told that before?  That would be super _weird_ , but…

“Y’know what?  That actually explains _so_ much about you.”

“Does it?  Why?”

Oh, _crap_!  Here he went again with the self-sabotage!  “Uh… I was… I was just kidding!  It meant nothing!  I’m just a kidder, that’s all!”

“All right,” she said, and he thanked his lucky stars she took that at face value.

When he got home a while later he started thinking about the whole thing, like _really_ thinking about it, and he suddenly understood some of the weirdness behind it all.

She really _did_ think they were an experiment!

It wasn’t any sort of _game_ she was playing.  She’d never done any of this before!  Never interfaced, never gone out anywhere, maybe never even _like_ liked anyone enough to _think_ about doing this kind of thing.

And… and that made _him_ the first.

Yikes.

He _should_ have been thrilled, but he was actually just scared.  She was taking all her cues from him, but he didn’t even know what those _were_!  He’d never _gotten_ this far before!  What was he supposed to be doing?  What _happened_ in a relationship after you started wondering about its future?

 

//

 

The more he learned about her, the more he got the feeling he needed to get out before she figured him out.  She was not only totally, completely admin, she was _the_ most _advanced_ administration bot he had ever even _heard_ of. 

She had once been the supervisor of dozens of human scientists and general employees.  She had reinvented some gun they’d never quite gotten to work and in doing so had become an expert in quantum physics and some branches of mathematics he was pretty sure were still theoretical on Pandora.  _She had written her own AI._

That last one threw him the most.  She refused to let him meet them, but he believed her when she said she had built herself two custom testing robots after all the humans had been killed.  That, right there, was the pinnacle of artificial intelligence.  AI that could create AI.  Who _did_ that?  _She_ did.  No _wonder_ she was content to stay down here all by herself.  If anyone found her… well, she already knew what they’d do.  She’d done all that already.  He still felt bad for her about it, but at the same time… well, she was smart.  She was very, very smart, so smart, in fact, he wasn’t really sure how she could stand to hold a conversation with him at all.  But he was beginning to think she didn’t actually _understand_ how smart she was.  She told him about all the things she’d done as though it were no big deal, and he sat there and listened and tried to come up with something _he’d_ done that didn’t sound totally pathetic in comparison.  There was nothing.  He couldn’t even borrow something from anybody else that he knew, because she’d long since outdone everybody in the universe.  She was an AI that could create AI.  And she was his girlfriend.

The thought made him feel like he’d been smacked in the face with a shovel.  Really, really hard.  That was nuts.  This whole thing was crazy.  And he’d been in a _lot_ of crazy situations in his life.  But this?  Whoo boy.  Bananas.

It wasn’t going to last.  He knew that now.  There was no freaking way a genius administrative supercomputer was going to stick with _him_.  Well, he’d enjoy it while he could.  Hopefully she wouldn’t realise what a total fail he was compared to her for a while longer.  He didn’t want to lose this.  He really, really didn’t want to lose this.  He’d almost have preferred to go kill another vault monster than have to go through the horrific, catastrophic end this thing was going to have eventually.  It was going to _suck_.  But he couldn’t bow out!  He just _liked_ her too gosh darn much.  He just wanted to hug her and never let go.  Ever.  Ever ever.  But she’d rip his arms off before she let _that_ happen.  She’d threatened to before and he was pretty sure she had _not_ been kidding.  He’d got the ‘no touching’ hint _real_ fast.  Still wished he’d actually managed to do it, though. 

At some point – he couldn’t remember – he had somehow brought up the topic of what the next step in their relationship should be, and strangely enough she didn’t really seem to have an opinion.  He was very confused when he asked if he could move in and she just said, “All right.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, not really knowing how these things went.  He _did_ know there was usually some sort of discussion about ground rules, or at least something like ‘absolutely do not open this door’, but she just shrugged and went back to whatever she was doing.  He never really _asked_ because the answer was always ‘testing’, which told him absolutely nothing.  He didn’t really _have_ anything, other than his action figures that was, which she found very funny and seemed quite happy to help him put someplace nice.  Nicer than where _he’d_ had them, anyway.  And it was really nice, to have her around _all_ the time!  Having someone to talk to whenever he wanted was the absolute _best_!  She _seemed_ happy, but then… it was weird.  She kinda… her attitude about him kinda did a one-eighty _overnight_ , but if he _asked_ about it she would just give him one of those looks she had and say he was being ridiculous.  Which wasn’t out of the _question_ , but… it didn’t _seem_ right, somehow.

She didn’t seem to have any time to spend with him anymore, but if he asked what it was she was actually _doing_ she just said it was work and that was it.  So he’d go off and mess around with all the cool science stuff she had – and she had a _lot_ of cool science stuff – until that one time the humans she was testing the weird gun with saw him, and she got _super_ angry about it.  So angry he thought she was gonna mash him into a paste.  Okay, okay.  Humans were _off limits_. 

But it was kinda feeling like _everything_ was.  Especially _her_ , and _she_ was the reason he was even here in the first place!  What the heck had he done this time?  It was hard to tell when they didn’t actually _talk_ that much anymore.

When Claptrap was left on his own, well, that was when stuff kinda… started breaking.  That wasn’t so bad.  It was just part of his existence, really.  What sucked was her _reaction_ to it.  The first couple times she got angry and insulted him, which kinda hurt, but he was mostly used to that kind of thing by now.  It was when she _stopped_ that he started to get upset about it.

When he went to tell her he’d broken this or destroyed that, she wouldn’t even say anything.  She’d just _look_ at him, and he wished he knew how she did it.  How she managed to just create this massive _aura_ of disappointment, right out of thin air, and direct it down on him through the suddenly incredibly blistering light coming out of her eye.  No matter how much he tried to apologise or promise he’d do better next time, she wouldn’t move it away from him or scale the disappointment back even a little bit.  It was the absolute _worst._   He usually managed to brush off people being disappointed in him, since it was a really common thing, but with _her_ it was just… as though it would be better if she just yanked the floor from under his wheel and let him fall into her bottomless pit.  He’d almost never had a feeling so bad as the one he got when she looked at him like that.  And the worst part of it all was that it was the _only_ way she had looked at him in _days._

And then there were the _fights_.  Whoo boy.

He didn’t mean to start them.  He wasn’t even sure _how_ they started, most of the time.  But she just didn’t _listen_ anymore!  And then he’d find himself yelling and trying to get _something_ out of her, because she always just _sat_ there _ignoring_ him, and then she would finally look at him and proceed to tear every word to shreds.

Her ability to do this?  Terrifying.  He was trying to talk to her and she was just there, waiting, sizing up every sentence and pulling out the weaknesses, which she then used to insult him with an efficiency so brutal he admired it even while she ripped open feelings inside him he _really_ wished he wasn’t discovering he had.  She’d stripped all the emotion from her voice a long time ago, too, and that made it all the worse because he felt like he was some worthless glitch standing in front of a cold and lofty artificial intelligence that was always one cycle away from doing away with his useless existence, but never bothering because he just wasn’t worth the effort.  And if that was what this was about, she was right.  He _wasn’t_ worth the effort. 

But she was.  At least, the memory of how she used to be was.  He missed that.  He missed that a _lot_.  And for once it had nothing to do with interfacing.  She used to be so nice and chill about stuff, about _him_ , and now she was just… a different person, almost. 

If there was one thing he absolutely _knew_ it was that bugging her while she was sleeping was a big no-no, but night was always when he got really sad and it was even _worse_ now that the one good thing he’d had seemed to have totally crumbled to dust.  And besides!  How was _he_ supposed to know she’d wake up if he went in there and pretended she was actually listening while he talked!  She’d never _mentioned_ it.  And wasn’t your girlfriend supposed to _help_ you when you were all sad about how sucky your life was and the fact that you didn’t seem to _have_ a rock bottom like everybody else because no matter what you did you just kept on going lower?  Wasn’t she supposed to _care_?

When he realised she was _awake_ and she was _looking_ at him he stopped talking, but after that he felt like he should be talking even _more_ because the silence sucked so much.  She was just _staring_ at him and it felt so _awful_ but he didn’t know what to do!

“What are you _doing_?” GLaDOS demanded finally, and he got that awful sinking feeling when he realised she’d asked in the good old mix of disgust and horror everyone else usually directed towards him.  He’d blown it.  He’d finally blown it.

“I’m… crying?” he answered, even though she could see that.  What?  Had she never seen a robot cry before?  True, not _that_ many people he’d known did it – in fact, maybe it _was_ just him, come to think of it –

“Why?  What kind of feature is _that_?”

“I didn’t _install_ it!”  Of course she didn’t cry.  Of course she didn’t.  She was a precision instrument, every part of her picked carefully for extreme efficiency.  What would _she_ know about stupid things like crying.

“Well, I don’t know what you want _me_ to do about it.”

“I’m sorry!” he shouted, throwing his hands out and wishing there was _some_ way to do something about the stupid leak in his eye.  Seriously!  Who had made that _possible_?

“What are you apologising for?”

“I don’t know!”

She turned away from him and that only made it much, much worse.  “There is something _very_ wrong with you.”

“You think I don’t _know_ that?”

“You seem to want _me_ to do something about it.”

“Would it _kill_ you?”

“I don’t have _time_ to deal with your _issues_ , Claptrap.”

“My _issue_ is that you won’t even _talk_ to me anymore!  What’m I even _here_ for if you don’t want anything to _do_ with me!”

“I don’t know and, quite frankly, I don’t really _care_ either.”

“If I could call you a bitch right now, I totally would!” Claptrap shouted at her.  He didn’t even realise his profanity filter had slipped at the worst possible time until she said coolly,

“It seems like you just did.”

That was when Claptrap wished some sort of magical speech filter had written and installed itself pronto, because the next brilliant thing to come out of his speaker was, “Well, you _are_!  You _are_ a bitch!  You won’t even tell me what it is I did!What, am I just supposed to _read your mind_?  Would it kill you to talk to me for like _thirty seconds_?”

“You know,” she said, in a way that made it feel like all of his components had been dissolved into acid and were attempting to drip their way through his chassis and out of his wheel well, “I think I was supposed to _care_ about you calling me that just now.  And maybe I would.  If I cared about _you_ , that is.  And we _both_ know just how ridiculous it would be for someone like me to have _any_ feelings whatsoever towards someone like _you._ ”

That hurt so bad he actually _stopped_ crying.  He just stood there.  It felt like someone had stuck a prodgun firmly in his back port and turned it _wayyyy_ up.

“You sad, pathetic little moron.”

“I’m leaving,” he heard someone say.  Oh.  Oh, _he’d_ said it.  Okay.  He was gonna have to get on that, then.  And he would, just as soon as he was able to figure out how to start his wheel motor.

“You say that like you think I ever _wanted_ you here in the first place.”

And why would she?  She was the greatest administration bot ever built.  He was only a leftover steward.  Kept alive through so much absolute crap for _no_ reason _he’d_ ever been able to figure out.  This was just another event in a long, long line of the endless chain of misery he seemed to _exist_ for.

“You’re nothing.  You always have been and you always will be.”

He’d turned around to go at some point, but he didn’t remember doing it.  He didn’t know if he remembered _how_ to go.

“I would be far better off if I’d never met you.”

“I know, babe,” Claptrap said quietly.  He’d never felt so defeated in his entire life, and he’d felt like that a _lot_.  He’d actually tried at this thing, given it his all, and that only seemed to have made the inevitable crash-and-burn suck more than ever.  “I know.”

 

//

 

He went home that night.

Not Sanctuary.  But the other place.  In the Wastes, where there was nothing but bullymongs and snow.  Because when he was really sad, like _really, really_ sad like he was now, he would go up to that place where Jack had dumped all the dead CL4P-TPs and he’d just look at the little hill and wonder why he wasn’t there with them. 

He remembered that day still.  He remembered what Jack had said and the sudden, awful realisation that there was nothing he could _ever_ do to make these people happy, not even if he did everything right the way they wanted it done, and he remembered how triumphantly Jack had sent out the command before turning around and shooting him for doing what he was told.  And then… Hammerlock, telling him he was the only one.  He’d done all that, had everything taken away from him and then some, and he couldn’t even have the dignity of being dead after it all.  He was gonna live forever at this rate and every day of his life was gonna _suck_.

And boy did his future look like it was made of _total suckage_.  Because he was such a sad, pathetic loser, he _really_ wanted to go back there and say whatever he had to to make this right.  And he would’ve.  If he’d thought there was anything _to_ say.  She was too much for him.  He’d known that from the beginning.  Once he’d realised she was admin he shoulda just left.  Then he wouldn’t be here, in the saddest place he could think of, wishing Hammerlock had just kept walking.  Everything would’ve been better if some bullymong had just smashed him to a billion pieces.  It would’ve been way easier than feeling like somebody had done that to him on the inside.   

Actually?   This was a _good_ thing.  She didn’t want anything to do with him, fine.  That was fine.  It was fine.  He had _more_ than enough stuff in his memory that, with a little bit of tweaking, he could work into a perfectly serviceable sequence of events where he’d actually had a girlfriend who had actually _liked_ him.  It was easy.  He did it all the time.  Change a sentence here, a look there, remove a few things entirely… there.  Perfect.  He was gonna bury this disaster under something good, just like he always did, and it wouldn’t be there to upset him anymore.  It would be gone.  It would be like she had never existed.  It was a good rewrite, too.  A good story.  He’d be happy whenever he looked at memories like this.  All he had to do was write it over the old crap and he’d be good to go. 

But for some reason it didn’t go how it usually did.

He tried so hard to do it.  He tried so, so hard to commit to the overwrite.  But he couldn’t.  He just couldn’t.  This was one thing he couldn’t pretend away.  One _person_. 

She was mean.  She was beautiful.  She was the craziest b**** he’d ever met.  And he couldn’t change her.  Not even in his own memory.  He had to leave her just like that, just as she was.  He couldn’t handle her.  He had completely, totally failed at doing it.  But she was perfect, and no matter how bad he wanted to just for his own peace of mind he could never, ever change her.

He’d really gone and fallen in love, huh?


	2. Chapter 2

He tried not to think about her, but that was pretty much impossible.  Funny thing was, he didn’t even think about the bad stuff that much.  It didn’t really _matter_ , not compared to the other stuff.  The things that came back to him most of the time were nice.  Sometimes he’d think about the way she leaned close to him while he was showing her something, or laughed at jokes everyone else would’ve told him to shut up for, or the times she’d actually _listened_ when he was talking.  She’d smelled nice, too.  Rusty.  But nice.  He’d miss that.

He also wondered how he was supposed to ever interface with anybody else after having had _that_.  Yeesh.  Talk about _expectations_.

He wasn’t sad for very long.  Sometimes he still got _really, really_ sad, and he’d cry and people would look at him funny because _why_ was a _robot_ crying – and he _really_ hoped he figured out how to shut that off someday – but most of the time he was just kinda… lowkey about it.  The biggest issue was that he’d see stuff on the ECHONet like _all the time_ that he wanted to show her, and he couldn’t, of course, but after a while he just started saving it all in a folder for her.  It was dumb and he knew that.  It was dumb to waste space on his drives storing pictures and videos and songs for someone he was never going to see again.  But hell.  It made him feel better.  And he could always delete it later. 

Well.  That was what he _told_ himself, anyway, though he had to admit after a few – well, ten was a bit _more_ than a few, but still – years of this that he probably wasn’t going to.  That was the trouble with being a robot: your memory just kinda sat there.  Other species had brains that couldn’t hang onto the stuff, so it would just fade and they’d just start forgetting about what had made them sad in the first place.  But _his_ memory _couldn’t_ fade.  He wasn’t ever gonna forget any of it.  He was just sorta stuck this way.  Forever doomed to miss a girl he never should’ve had in the first place.  It was one of those things that really sucked about being artificial intelligence.  It didn’t _usually_ suck, since he usually just replaced the suckage with something better.  And he thought about doing it a few more times.  But nah.  He’d leave her the way she was.  Even if it was hard to think about, sometimes.

And then he got the email.

_> Hey.  Funnychips._

He was so shocked – she still _remembered_ him after all this time? – that he had to read the message several hundred thousand times before he was sure it was real.  Actually, no.  He still wasn’t sure at all.  But reality was reality, and though he’d imagined a reunion with her about a bajillion times, it had never started like this.

Okay.  Okay.  She’d emailed him.  Geez.  Oh geez.  He had to _answer_ her.  With what?  What was she expecting?  What did she _want_?  Ahhh _crap_ he’d forgotten how _hard_ having a girlfriend was…

He then spent the next three hours composing and trashing several thousand emails.

A lot of them were apologies, until he realised he wasn’t sure what he was apologising _for_.  His existence would probably just about cover it, but if she minded _that_ she wouldn’t have emailed him.  He got stuck for a while on the fact that she had called him _that_ – hey!  It was the only _nice_ nickname anyone had ever given him! – and once he got back on track he scrapped the apology thing.  It was probably better to just move along.  Pretend none of that had ever happened.  Yeah.  He’d do that.

He settled on something short.  Simple.  Not desperate, or clingy.  Casual.  He could do casual.  He didn’t want to give her a reason not to answer back.  Which she _totally_ didn’t have to do.  But _boy_ was he hoping.

_> Hey babe!  How’s it going?_

He spent quite a while after that deciding what, exactly, he should punctuate, and where, and if he should maybe change a word here or there or the whole thing entirely.  Eventually he actually did send it, but by total accident, at which time he retracted into his chassis and silently asked the Almighty Robot Policeman to smite him then and there for being such a dumbass.  God.  As if he’d sent her _that_.  She was totally just gonna ignore him.  She wasn’t gonna answer.  She was just gonna shake her core all disappointed and delete it.  She wasn’t even gonna read it!  She probably had already deleted it.  All emails from him probably went straight to the trash.  That’s where he put the emails he sent himself, so why wouldn’t she?  Man.  As if.  As if she would actually -

 _> Come over_.

He read that about a million and a half times before he was convinced it was real.  And even then he had to read it another few hundred thousand times to make sure.  Come over?  Really?  Him?  She’d actually sent that to him?  She -

He was so surprised he unfolded himself again.  Wow.  Oh wow oh wow oh wow -

She wanted to _see_ him again!

Even _more_ surprising was that she wanted him to come _then and there_ , which he wasn’t gonna argue about, but was still hella confusing.  The _whole visit_ was hella confusing, in fact. 

She didn’t really _say_ much to him, or look at him, or even acknowledge his existence at all, really, so he just talked about everything he could think of because he was trying not to think about how _awkward_ all of this was.  In fact, the only time she reacted to anything he said was when he mentioned offhand that she looked a little different but he liked it.

“What?” she said, looking at him in that same confused way she had when he’d told her she was pretty all those years ago.  He gestured up over the both of them.

“Y’know.  You had some wiring problems.  Looks like most of ‘em got fixed.  You can tell the newer stuff ‘cause it’s a little darker.”

She just kept _staring_ at him, and he moved back without really thinking about it.  “I uh… I think I’m gonna head off now,” he said, trying to keep his voice as casual as possible.  What a _disaster_.  Somehow he’d managed to screw this up too.  “Um… if you wanna meet up again sometime, you can… just message me anytime, huh?”

“Yeah,” she said distantly, moving away from him.  He was _so confused_.  What had he done?  Had she actually _wanted_ him here?  What was this _about_?  But it was too late to ask now.  He’d already volunteered to leave and he didn’t want her to have a reason _not_ to message him again.  This whole thing had kinda sucked.  But there was time to improve it, right?  He couldn’t mess things up _twice_.

Well.  He _probably_ could.  But he’d try harder not to.

When he got back to his place on Sanctuary he spent a long time going over and over the trip down there, and as weird as it was he didn’t think he’d done _anything_ this time.  He didn’t see any reactions to anything he’d said, other than the thing about how she looked of course, but at the same time she seemed kinda… mad.  But – crazy idea! – _not at him_.

Who else could there _be,_ though?  She’d said no one else was _there_.  Unless… someone was _now_.  Ten years _was_ quite a while, especially for an artificial intelligence.  Ooh!  Maybe she’d been mad at those test robots of hers.  Yeah!  Yeah, that was probably it!  Okay.  All right.  He had a second chance at something!  He was gonna do this thing _right_.  Even though… even though he wasn’t actually sure what he’d done the first time.  Oh well.  He’d figure it out when he got there.

 

//

 

He refreshed his email program continuously for the next couple days, nervously anticipating the next message from her – which she hadn’t said there would _be_ one, but hey, foolish optimism was kinda his thing – and to his relief and surprise he got one sometime after the sun had gone down and he was watching Dr Zed surgically remove something they hadn’t identified yet out of some dude’s ass.  Humans were _weird_ about sticking things up there.  Like, _really_ weird.  One time he’d seen what he was _pretty_ sure was the barrel of a sniper – oh, right.  The email. 

_> I have a friend who wants to meet you._

Ooh!  Now things were getting _real_ interesting!  _Sure.  Pass her info along!_

_> He doesn’t have email.  Just let me know when you’d like to arrange it for._

… _he_?  Oh no.  Oh no no no. 

_> You know how it is, babe.  I got nothing going on. _

_> I’ll tell him sometime tomorrow, then._

_> Sounds good!  Hey, how long’ve you known this guy?  Just wondering since this is my first time hearing about him. _

_> About ten years now._

Ah… _crap_.  He didn’t know any profanities that covered this kinda situation, even if he’d been able to use them.  Crap!  He’d really thought!  He’d really thought he was gonna get a second chance, too!  Dammit!  If only she wasn’t so gosh darn irresistible.  _Then_ maybe he coulda had another shot.  But of course.  Of _course_ she’d found someone else after kicking him to the curb.  Okay.  She hadn’t really done _that_.  And… and they could still be _friends._ Or they could try, anyway.  He’d never been _friends_ with an old girlfriend before.  He wasn’t really sure how that worked.  Especially when there was a _boyfriend_ in the picture.

 

//

Claptrap tried really hard not to like the guy.  He tried _really, really_ hard.  This was the guy that’d stolen his girlfriend, for heaven’s sake!  But… he did.  He actually had a lot of fun hanging out with him, and before he really knew what was going on he’d agreed to come back as often as he could.  And that was fine!  The guy was a class act.  But then Claptrap found out something that made the whole situation _even worse_ than it had already been:

GLaDOS had made a _kid_ with this guy.

Yep.  She couldn’t just make custom robots to do her crazy tests, nooooo, she’d had to go ahead and make herself an honest-to-God _daughter_ from scratch.  And that kid was the _spitting_ image of her!  Smart, pretty, and _tough_.  She had one of those _stares_ that just about matched GLaDOS’s.  Claptrap was _shocked_ at the amount of GLaDOS that seemed to have been packed into a chassis that tiny.  If he’d met her somewhere else and she _was_ someone else, well, he just might’ve given her a try.  Maybe.  She was pretty scary for a robot her size.  Usually Claptrap would’ve been _super_ into that, but man!  That kid.  She was a handful.

Because he’d been really hoping for his luck to get worse, Wheatley sprung on him one day that he was taking the kid elsewhere and Claptrap was going to hang with GLaDOS, which… he really did not want to do.  Be alone with her?  What was he even supposed to _say_?  Did she even _want_ that, or had Wheatley just _decided_ on it?  Claptrap wasn’t even given time to really think about it, and before he knew it he was back where he’d started.  Alone in that big ol’ room with that _specimen_ of a robot.  What to do, what to do.

“This wasn’t my idea,” he felt the need to say.

“I know,” she said.  “It was one of these… suggestions he makes sometimes.”

“And you… listen to them?”

“A lot has changed since then,” GLaDOS said, and he had to admit even he had noticed that.  She sounded different.  Softer, kinda?  Almost like she was tired and had been for a long time.  He wondered if he’d ever learn why.

“I thought about you a lot.  For a while,” she continued, and he could not have _asked_ her to say something to get him more excited!  “Then I put you out of my mind, as we do.  When I was reminded recently of your existence, it was…”

“What?”  He should probably just shut up and let her talk, but he couldn’t help it!  This was like… a movie!  A cheesy movie with a happy ending!  Where he was getting it from he didn’t know, but this was the kinda thing that led up into one!

“A lot of things,” she finished.  “I’m still not sure what all of them are.”

“I feel ya,” he said, and she shook her core wryly.

“I’m sure you do.”

“I’ve got a lot of stuff saved for you.  If you wanna see it.”

She looked at him for the first time, optic narrowed.  “What?”

“Y’know.  Whenever I saw something I thought you might like or whatever, I put it in a folder to show you later.  Just in case… just in case there was one.”

Aw, hell.  He’d ruined it.  She thought that was weird.  Was it weird?  It was totally weird, wasn’t it.  Oh well.  Too late to take it back now.  “I wrote you _so_ many emails, too,” he went on while frantically trying to get himself to shut the hell up.

“I kept the ones you sent me.”

He froze, wondering if he had time to sift through his sent emails real quick because he had _no_ idea what she was talking about.  “Uh… what emails?”

“You sent me four emails the day after you left.  All of them were very strange, but especially the last one.”

Ohhh.  Geez.  He had _no idea_ what he’d been doing that day.  “I do _not_ remember those.  But in my defense I’m pretty sure I was _super_ drunk.”

“I don’t want to know how you managed that.”

“There’s honestly _way_ too many ways.  It’s a wonder every bot on Pandora isn’t high or smashed _all the time_!  Also, I got kicked out of Moxxi’s for that.  Again.  She’s banned me like forty-nine times by now.  Gonna go for the big five-oh sometime soon.”

 _Man_ it was good to hear her laugh again!  It had been _so long_ since he’d made a girl do that.  While he was trying to keep it cool over that she said, “The emails.  The ones you didn’t send.”

“Yeah?”

“I’d like to read them.”

Oh.  Ohhh.  Hm.  “Are… you sure?  Because there’s a lot.  Like… thousands.  I’m not kidding.  I don’t know what I even _put_ in that many emails.”

“Yes,” GLaDOS answered, and even though he was sure this was gonna be yet another in a really long line of terrible mistakes he packed them all up into a file and sent them to her.  After he’d done it he went through them with mounting panic.  Ah s***.  Oh, why had he sent her _that_?  And – wow.  She did _not_ need to know about _that_.  And –

“Do you want the other stuff too?” he asked.  He had to distract himself _somehow_.  She shook her core.

“You said you wanted to show them to me.”

“Yeah…”  Was she being _literal_ again?

“So show them to me.  Later.  We have lots of time.”

They… they did?

He had no idea how many of the stupid emails she got through in the next half hour, but knowing her it was probably all of them.  And even a handful of them was too many.  Why did he have to be so – so – like he was!?

“There’s something I have to tell you,” GLaDOS said after a few more minutes.  He was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear it because it was probably along the lines of, ‘You’re a pathetic yellow dumbass, Claptrap,’ and even though it was true he just wasn’t in the mood to _hear_ it right now, but he said, “What,” anyway.  Just because.  Why not.  Seal his fate then and there.  Sounded like a plan.  A+ for the little guy.

“What I said to you before you left was a lie.”

Okay.  That was… okay.  Her mentioning it made him think about it, and _that_ sucked.  But then she kept talking, which was both awful and great at the same time.  No wonder he hadn’t been able to find another girlfriend after the mess with her.  Well, there were probably _other_ reasons.  Probably.

“You aren’t nothing.”

… huh?

“You’re special.  You always have been and you always will be.”

Geez.  He kinda wanted to cry now, but if he did he’d _really_ mess it up.  She was being nice but she wasn’t _that_ nice.  “Oh.”

“You did something to me back then that I still don’t have the ability to understand.  At least not the way I’d like,” GLaDOS said.  “Perhaps I never will.  But these emails confirm to me something I knew back then but did not want to.”

“And… and what was that.”

“That it was me who didn’t deserve you.”

Ooookay.  She was _not_ making any sense.  “You lost me, babe.”

“I haven’t finished them all yet.  So perhaps I could be wrong.  But not once in any of the emails I _have_ read did you ever have anything cruel to say to me.  Not even in the ones you don’t remember sending.”

He was _still_ lost.  “Why would I want to say anything like that to you?”

“Because I was a bitch and I deserved it.”

Oh.  Well… that _did_ make sense, kinda, but… “Calling you that didn’t make me feel better, GLaDOS.”

“I have something to ask of you.  You can refuse.  It’s your choice.  I just want to make that clear before I ask.”

Claptrap barely had the ability to say no to people he _didn’t_ like, let alone the girl he was still stupidly in love with even after not seeing her for ten years.  “Lay it on me!”

“Can you forgive me for what I said?”

Claptrap usually had words for _any_ situation, no matter _what_ was going on, but for once this ability was just _gone_.  What a wild thing to ask!  _She_ wanted _his_ forgiveness?  For what?  He almost felt like he should be apologising to _her_ for making her put up with him again!

“I… I can’t,” he answered, once he realised she was waiting for him to say something.  Man.  What a straaaange concept that was, right there.

“That’s fine.”  She almost sounded like she _meant_ it, too.

“No!  No, I don’t mean it like _that_!  It’s… I don’t got anything to forgive you _for!_ ”  Ah crap, how did he put this…  “It wasn’t… I haven’t been holding a _grudge_ over it or anything.  It just… happened.  I kinda wish it hadn’t, but I don’t sit around _mad_ at you for it.”

“I would have.”

He shrugged.  “I don’t know what else to tell ya!  Also, I don’t think I have any grudge-holding subroutines.  So I couldn’t even if I _wanted_ to.  I totally don’t!  But just saying.”

“I have more than enough of those for the both of us,” GLaDOS said.

“Also… I’m _really_ sorry for calling you that.”

“But – “

“Look.  Maybe you kinda deserved it.  I don’t know.”  He realised late that he’d interrupted her and he knew that girls _really_ got mad when he did that, but it was too late now.  It was almost impossible for him to interrupt _himself_.  “I don’t even wanna keep talking about it.  I just feel really bad about it.”

“Even though I deserved it.”

He waved one hand, mostly because he’d been standing still for a _really_ long time.  “I’m the last guy who should be telling you what you deserve.  I don’t even really _know_ you that well!”

“You know more than you think.”

Whoa.  She’d almost said he was _smart_.  “Are you uh… are you dying or something?”

“What?” GLaDOS asked, laughing a little.  “No.  I’m not dying.”

“But you’re being so _nice_!”

“I told you.  A lot has changed.”

He must have had a disbelieving vibe all of a sudden because she went on,

“It’s been ten years, Claptrap.  And with what I’ve been through, it feels more like fifty.  I don’t think I have words to explain how much Caroline alone has aged me.”

“She’s somethin’,” Claptrap admitted, and she tilted her core in amusement.

“Well.  She _does_ have some very… _interesting_ parents.”

“She sure does.  One of ‘em’s a dumbass and the other one’s a smartass!”

He was relieved when she started laughing.  That _totally_ could have been too far.  “So did those traits multiply or cancel each other out?”

“How should I know!  You’re the one who _invented_ robot genetics, you tell me!”

“I did, didn’t I,” she murmured, sounding very pleased with herself.  Which was _incredibly_ sexy, and also _incredibly_ distracting because now he was thinking about _that_ , and it was probably a _really_ bad time to mention it but why not.  Today was the day to go for broke.  Or at least to see how far he could push it.

“And uh… how is Wheatley at uh… y’know…”

“Finally,” GLaDOS said with amusement.  “I thought you’d never ask.”

Oh.  Okay.  She was… just rolling with it.  Not what he’d expected.  But okay.  He’d… hm.  He didn’t even know where to _go_ from here.  “It would be a shame if I managed to meet expectations!”

“I don’t really have an answer for you.  Your methodologies are very different, but one way isn’t really better nor worse than the other.”

“But you’d be up for it again?  Right?”  Ack.  Here he went, pushing it too far.

“We’ll see.  I’m not sure how any of that would work now that there are two of you.”

Claptrap knew quite a _lot_ of ways, but he _really_ needed to shut up before this went sour.  “No rush!  It’s uh… been about ten years though, so if you _did_ want to rush I’d be cool with that.”

“What?  Why didn’t you just find another girlfriend?”

Ohhhh boy.  She was still just a bit naïve, huh?  That was _so cute_!  “Let’s just say the way _my_ luck goes, a _toaster_ would’ve said she was too good for me.”

“A _toaster_?”

“I _cannot_ afford to be picky.  An offer’s an offer!  Even if it’s from a toaster.”

“That’s pretty low, even for you.”

“Babe, there’s no depth I won’t go to!  I even tried to get with a power box once.”

“And what happened,” she said, actually _sounding_ interested, so he went ahead and plowed on.

“It uh… killed itself.”

He honestly didn’t mind one bit when she started laughing.  “Should I be taking a cue from that?” she asked, and mmmm did it sound _good_ when she teased like that. 

“Bad idea, babe.  Ol’ Brewster was just a power box!  You’ve got like a small country to run.  And a kid.”

“I really do not know how I ended up in this situation.  What I _actually_ wanted was to be left _alone_.”

Oh.  “So um… what’m _I_ doing here?”

She didn’t answer for a minute. 

“I don’t know,” she said finally.  “Maybe… maybe I just missed you.”

Well, _that_ was just _silly_.

“There was one more thing I needed to tell you.”

Oh geez.  She was _really_ laying it out today.

“Far from wishing it never happened… meeting you was actually one of the best things to ever happen to me.”

Claptrap didn’t wanna think about any of that anymore – it was done!  Over!  They were moving past it _as they spoke_! – but if it was bugging her he should probably just… let her talk.  That was the kind of thing a good boyfriend did, right? 

“You made my world a lot bigger in a way no one else ever could have.  So… thank you.”

“Oooookay,” Claptrap said, because now he needed to put the brakes on this madness.  “Not that I don’t like being told I did something right for once, but you are _really_ starting to freak me out.  You _sure_ you’re not dying?  ‘Cause I think maybe you _are_ but you just don’t know it yet.”

“I’m not dying,” she repeated.  “Wheatley gets confused too during these kinds of conversations.”

“Because it’s weird!  You’re not _nice_ , you’re… well, you’re the b-word.  But in the good way!”

“There’s a good way to use it?”

“Oh yeah!  It’s like, totally a compliment now.  It’s what you call a girl who’s _really_ badass.  Honest!  I’m not making this up!  It’s legit.”

Her silence made him think maybe she didn’t quite believe him, but he realised her thoughts had gone in a different direction when she asked,

“Why did you let me treat you like that?”

Aaaaaand now he was about to sound pathetic.  Great.  “ _Everyone_ treats me like that.  Part that got to me was… you almost didn’t.”

She didn’t say anything.  He didn’t like the way the silence felt and was about to say something, he had no idea _what_ but _something_ , when she said,

“Claptrap.  I meant it when I said we could start over.  I… I’d like to.  But I will not give Wheatley up for you.”

He couldn’t even be upset about it.  Wheatley was great.  He’d’ve been _shocked_ if she’d been willing to trade Wheatley for him.  He wasn’t even sure he’d be cool with doing that, since Wheatley was his BFF and all.  He was pretty sure bro code had something in it about not stealing your bro’s girl.  Been a while since he’d looked into that.

“It’s only because of him you’re even here right now.  The day I had you here before?  I was trying to make him jealous.  It didn’t work.  He decided he wanted to meet you instead.”

Wow.  What a _saint_.

“He has earned my loyalty.  But there _is_ a place for you here.  If you want it.”

“I _do_ want it,” he said, before he’d thought about it.  Not that _thinking_ had ever changed his mind about anything.  Was he gonna mess the whole thing up over again?  Probably.  But hell.  He had nothing to lose!

Wait.  If he got stuck, couldn’t he just ask Wheatley to help him out?  Wheatley was already cool with all this, right?  They’d be like… a team!  And there was _nothing_ Claptrap liked better than being on one of _those_.  Maybe he’d even get help if he asked for it!  It was worth a try, wasn’t it?

“I need to sleep,” GLaDOS said, and even though he’d gotten way more than he’d ever expected out of this, he was still super disappointed to hear that.  He’d forgotten how much sleep she needed.

“Sure,” he said, and he backed up to leave.

“Would you mind doing something for me?”

“Probably not?”

“Can you stay until Wheatley comes back?”

He didn’t know how to answer that.  Of course he _wanted_ to.  But he’d never _done_ it before.  He’d never actually _seen_ her sleep, not really.  What did he even _do_ while she was doing that?

She apparently took his lack of… anything as an answer because she said, “Thanks,” and lowered herself.  She hadn’t exactly been lording over him before, so she hadn’t been far way, not really, but now he realised just how _close_ to her he was.  She was still about a foot and a half off the floor, but he could _definitely_ have given her a hug real easy.  That was how close she was.

So… he could touch her.  He could reach.  And she was _right there_.  If she didn’t want him to, she’d mention it, right?  Her proximity sensors would tell her what he was doing before he even managed to do it.  So he raised his arm and started inching his hand toward her, and – geez.  It was _shaking_.  Man.  If he was _this_ nervous, maybe he should stop.  But eventually he had just the top of his hand touching her core, and she wasn’t saying anything or moving away.  So he wondered if he could go a little farther.  Having his hand flat was almost the same thing, right?  So he slid his palm _reallllll_ slow until it was right against her and his thumb was resting against the front of her core, and she was _still_ doing nothing.  Still!  Okay.  Could she actually _feel_ any of this?  Did that count as taking advantage?  Nah.  She _definitely_ could.  And she _definitely_ was not stopping him, so maybe… maybe he could hug her.  Just a little bit.  Just for a second.  Now that he was so close he _really_ needed to know what that was like.  _Right now_.  He looked up and down at her core.  She was obviously too big for him to get his arms around, from the left side of her where he’d ended up at least, but he could probably fit one arm where the metal track was.  It wasn’t that wide, but neither was his arm.  The other one he’d just put around the front.  Yeah.  Yeah, that would work.  So he did that, _really_ slow so it was _super_ obvious what he was doing, and she didn’t stop him!  Didn’t do anything at all! 

So… so he was hugging her.  Right now.  Just… hugging his girlfriend.  ‘cause that was the kind of thing boyfriends did.  The kinda thing their girlfriends _let_ them do.  He was just doing that.  Right now.  And he was never, ever gonna stop doing it.  He was never, ever moving from this spot, hell no.  That was it.  He was just gonna hug her forever, and –

“Take it easy,” she murmured, and he yelled and jumped off of her completely.

“Sorry!  I was just – and you – you didn’t – and I was – and –“

“You can do that if you want to,” she interrupted, thankfully, because there were _no_ actual sentences in his vocalisation pool just then.  “Just don’t _hang_ off of me.”

“So – so you were actually okay with it?  Because – well, you didn’t really –“

She raised her core enough that she could stare at him, which really did not help with the speech situation.  “I would have mentioned it if it wasn’t.”

“Well… y’know, sometimes women kinda just expect you to _guess_ , and I wasn’t getting any _hints_ off ya so –“

“You want a hint?”

“Uh…”  It sure would be _helpful_.  “Yes?”

 “Very well.”  And before he had a chance to really _know_ what was happening she’d pressed her lens into the top of his chassis and…

“There you go,” she said conversationally, lying back down as though she hadn’t just spent the last few hours totally throwing his world into a tornado and then spun it around the other way after what she’d just done.  “I hope that was clear enough.”

“Did you just _kiss me_?” Claptrap asked incredulously, and even though no one had ever done such a thing before he knew there was no other explanation for it.  But he was still asking.  Because he was not so good with the hints.  Also, he was wondering if he’d imagined it.  He _hoped_ he hadn’t, because _boy_ was that nice, but maybe he _had_ and –

“Did you like it?”

“Uh… yeah.  Of course I –“

“Then shut up.”

Another one of her ingenious ideas!  He put himself up against her again and did his best to do as she’d asked.  It was something, really, being this close.  He could feel her brain working away, could hear her chassis doing its thing (whatever that was), and it was just… damn.  He couldn’t _believe_ he’d lost this, once.  And he was getting the chance to have it again!  Was this even _real_?  Or had he actually gone ahead and overwritten that old disaster with – ooh.  Nope.  Definitely still there.  He wasn’t gonna look at any of that, though, because she was _right here_ and he was _right here_ and he was _with_ her again and he was _touching_ her and she _wanted_ him to and –

All he wanted to do, suddenly, was tell her.  He was so in love with her he was _terrified_ of it, but maybe if he said something that would help.  He was _so happy_ but also _so scared_ and he was _actually_ ready to start crying but there was nooooo way he was gonna make her deal with that today.  Geez!  Where had this even _come_ from!  It was so much _different_ from before!  He was getting kinda overwhelmed and was really close to making an excuse up and telling her he _couldn’t_ stay after all, but… he couldn’t.  He couldn’t _move_ , much less find a way to _lie_ to her.  He had her back.  He actually _had her back_.

“One last thing,” GLaDOS murmured, startling him into grabbing her too hard again.

“Uh… yeah?” he said, doing his best to calm down.  Which was impossible, given the situation he was in.

“You never did bring me any DRAM.”

Oh.  Right.  He had totally forgotten about that.  “Oh, yeah.  I’ll track some down for ya, but I can’t say if you’ll uh… be into what I can find or not.”

“That’s our secret, by the way.”

“He doesn’t know about it?”  Wasn’t that like… essential information?

“He wouldn’t understand it if he did.”

Well, okay.  It _was_ her business, after all.

She went to sleep after that, leaving Claptrap there by himself in mounting panic.  When _was_ Wheatley coming back?  What did he do when he _did_?  Did he leave?  Was it okay if he stayed?  Did he _want_ to stay?  Was this even really _happening_?  Did GLaDOS _really_ want to take him back?  Aw geez, all of this was so _complicated._ Life had been _so_ much easier when he’d just liked her for her chassis.  Which was… actually pretty complicated, now that he thought about it.  It had so many _parts_ and what if he _touched_ one by accident and she just _fell apart_ in his hands!  He would’ve tried to tell himself he was being dramatic if that _exact_ thing hadn’t happened _multiple_ times before.  Oh, man.  What would he even _do_ then?  There was _no way_ he could fix her, and he’d have to be all like, ‘Hey Wheats, so uh… I broke her already.  My bad’ and then Wheatley would get mad at him and then he’d get really sad and maybe cry and – and – he didn’t even _know_ how Wheatley felt about crying robots!  Would he get mad?  He’d probably get _so pissed_ he’d just do exactly what GLaDOS would’ve done, and throw him in the incinerator, where he’d spend the rest of his days in android hell… wait.  He wasn’t an android. Was there a robot hell?  Sometimes he kind felt like his _life_ was robot hell, but right now it was looking pretty good, or it would be until he accidentally broke GLaDOS, at least, and then he’d be in for the whole seven levels thing for _sure…_

Just when he was _really_ about to start panicking, Wheatley showed up!  Thank God!  He moved away from GLaDOS immediately.  Not very far, because now that he was doing it he kinda… didn’t really want to.  He was in the middle of telling Wheatley he was gonna split when GLaDOS _moved_.  And _not_ in the opposite direction, either.  So that… so that she was touching Claptrap again.

Ohhhhh boy.  He was getting _really_ nervous know.  What did _that_ mean?  According to Wheatley, it meant he was _stuck_ there!  All right.  Okay.  He could try to handle that.  But when he asked Wheatley to help him out, he just kinda… stared down at him for a minute.  What did _that_ mean?  Did Wheatley not know either?  He wasn’t thinking about how to set Claptrap up, was he?  Nah.  His confusion looked pretty genuine.

He told Claptrap that what he was already doing was fine, and hey!  Look at that!  He was doing this right already!  Well, sure.  He could just… keep holding her.  He could do that.  It wasn’t _hard_ , and as long as he didn’t _hang_ off her again he couldn’t mess it up…

He was getting nervous again so he asked Wheatley how Carrie was doing, and it really seemed _he_ didn’t know what to do with her any more than Claptrap did.  Which was kinda funny, since he was her dad and all.  Then again, she _was_ GLaDOS’s kid.  With _her_ for a mom, she was practically _guaranteed_ to be difficult as all hell.  Amazing! but _difficult_.

After he realised he’d stopped paying attention to the present again he tried to ask Wheatley about something else, but… apparently _he_ needed to sleep too!  Like, really?  Claptrap was just supposed to hang out here in the dark and the quiet by _himself?_   True.  He could go to sleep too.  He didn’t get _tired_ very often, but he could just _do_ that whenever he wanted.  But he couldn’t hold GLaDOS and sleep at the same time.  His gyros went offline during sleep.

The facility was kinda… scary when nobody was talking.  It was a little hard not to hang onto GLaDOS too much, actually.  He could just _hear_ the way the entire place was being held up by the mere will of the supercomputer he was next to, and if she lapsed for even _one second_ the floor would just drop out from under him and he’d just fall down… how far down did this place go again?  A billion feet?  Well, that was practically forever!  He’d just be falling down there forever!  Nobody would ever know where he’d gone!  Well, nobody would _care_ , either, so no harm no foul –

GLaDOS said something in binary, but he had no idea what.  Had he done something?  He didn’t think so.  _What_ , he asked her, wondering how he could possibly have annoyed her while she was sleeping.

_She is not talking to you._

Claptrap yelled and really _did_ start gripping her, until she kinda twitched and he made himself calm down.  _Who said that_? he asked.  Maybe he’d imagined it. 

 _We did_.

_Uh… and you are… invisible?_

_No_ , the invisible person(s) said.  _We are the panels._

Whoa.  Wait.  _You’re… you’re sentient too_?  Just how many people did GLaDOS _have_ running around the place now?

 _A little.  Most of the systems are_ , the… panels said.  _But we can only communicate like this, so most people cannot hear us._

Aw.  That was sad.  _I can hear you no problem!  Someone should’ve told me you were there.  I’m up for a chat anytime!_

 _We know_ , the panels said, sounding like they thought that was funny.  Oh.  GLaDOS probably talked to them, right?  So they probably knew _aaaall_ about him.  Actually, now that he thought about it, the lights on them looked kinda like… _eyes_.

 _Do you guys uh…_ watch _everything?_

 _Sort of,_ they answered.  _We accept visual information, but we cannot see it ourselves.  It gets sent to Surveillance for processing._

That sounded way more complicated than Claptrap wanted to get into right now.  _So is it boring?  Just hanging there like that all day?  How do you feel about people_ walking _on you all the time?  Can you even_ feel _that, or –_

 _You are_ just _as she said you were_ , the panels interrupted.  He felt suddenly extra-aware of just who he was next to right now.

_Annoying as hell, right?_

_Oh yes,_ they answered.  _But that is not an insult.  Not for you._

He didn’t really _get_ that.  When was _annoying_ ever _not_ an insult?  Then again, GLaDOS _was_ pretty incomprehensible sometimes.  Maybe this was just one of those things.  _Did she uh… say anything else?_

_Oh, many things.  But we think we will wait and see if she tells you herself._

He groaned.  _She’s never gonna do that._

_She will.  But you must be very patient._

_Oh yeah, because I’m_ soooooooooo _good at_ that!

_Will you tell us about the place you come from?_

What?  They actually _wanted_ him to talk to them?  _Uh… sure.  What did you want to know?_

_Everything._

Well, it _would_ be nice to have someone to talk to… _Okay.  Sure!  Well, it’s kinda like here, but different…_

 

//

 

In the morning he went with Wheatley to this hole in the wall of the facility Wheatley apparently looked out of every day – because he couldn’t leave the facility by himself, not that he ever really seemed to _want_ to, so he just looked outside for a while instead – and Claptrap was feeling a little weird after spending the whole night next to GLaDOS and said a little too much.  Wheatley, of course, wanted to help him with that, but that was when Claptrap had to remember that Wheatley really didn’t know that much about him.  Once he knew what Claptrap _really_ was, he wouldn’t wanna hang out with him anymore.  And that would suck.  Having a best friend was _really_ sweet.  And if Claptrap had had the chance to list all the things he’d ever _wanted_ in a best friend, that person would pretty much have been who Wheatley was.  It was too good to be true.  Or at least, too good for _him_.

When he got back to Sanctuary he headed up to Moxxi’s, not because he really _wanted_ to go there but because that was usually where the people were.  Oh sure, there was a dude or a chick standing around complaining here and there, but if you wanted to listen to actual _conversations_ you had to go to the bar.  He really _had_ been kicked out of Moxxi’s as many times as he’d told GLaDOS, but she usually just sighed and complained that he was taking up one of her barstools.  Which was exactly what he was doing right now.

“Oh, great,” some dude in a beatup brown coat said.  “ _Claptrap’s_ back.”

There was a weak chorus of _yay_ from the other people sitting around the counter and from some of the people seated in the lounge as well.  And usually it didn’t bother him that much.  Well, it did.  A little.  Okay, a lot.  But that was his life, right?  So no point in getting all _mopey_ over it.  Just act like it didn’t bug him.  Just remember that he deserved it anyway.

No.  No, it wasn’t working today.

He slid his hands together and tapped his thumbs against each other.  Geez.  He was feeling just _terrible_.   Like he’d done something he shouldn’t have.  He didn’t _think_ he had.  All he’d done yesterday was hang with GLaDOS and then talk to the panels for like six hours.  They’d been pretty interested in what he was telling them.  That had been nice.  How long had it even _been_ since someone had asked him questions and _wanted_ to talk to him like that?

Well… never.  That had _never_ happened.  Ever.  Not even back when he’d been part of a product line.

He kept staring at his hands.  He had the feeling he was gonna figure out what was going on here, so long as he didn’t lose his train of thought, that was.  He might.  That happened a lot.  He was pretty sure there was some literal code-based train up there in his mind someplace that was all full of holes and stuff so that he was guaranteed to lose track of absolutely everything.  Hm.  What kind of train _was_ it?  Hyperion bullet train, probably.  Everything up there was Hyperion.  He’d tried to install stuff from other manufacturers before, but it never went very well.  Mmmm, that brought back memories of the good old days of Hyperion engineers and all the things they used to say…

“Every time he leaves I pray he won’t come back.”

They hadn’t said _that_.  Had they?  He hadn’t exactly _overwritten_ the clusters, but they were still kinda fuzzy.  That happened when your memory was a literal clusterf***.  That was kinda funny, actually.  GLaDOS might like that one.  No, she’d _definitely_ like it.  He just needed to remember to tell her about it…

“I’d ask where he’s even _going_ , but I don’t actually care.  I just wanna know that he’s not _here_.”

Nope.  They definitely had not said that.  He didn’t know if somebody was saying it _right now_ or if he was just _remembering_ somebody saying it, though.  Not that it made that much of a difference. 

“Why does he even _come_ here?  He _knows_ none of us want to talk to him.”

Now _that_ was just _untrue_.  People _did_ want to talk to him!  He’d talked to the panels last night for _hours_!  And _they_ were people!  Sort of.  Not that humans really understood that you only needed a little bit of sentience to be a person.  They got all hung up on the ‘being a breathing, bleeding meatbag’ requirement.  And _who_ would _want_ to be _that_?  Having a chassis was _soooo_ much more convenient.  Also, bandaids were _way_ more fun when you didn’t actually need them.  Wheatley would probably _love_ them!  He’d have to get some for him.  Ooh, Carrie would probably like them too.  Man, GLaDOS would be _so mad_ if they just went up to her covered in totally useless bandaids…

“What wiped out all the other ones, anyway?  Why didn’t he go with them?  Are we just _cursed_ to have him hanging around here forever?  Ugh.  I hope not.”

He could feel that his hands were kinda curled up into each other now, but he wasn’t really _looking_.  He was having more of that gross _feeling_.  He kinda thought he’d had it before, but he couldn’t _quite_ place it.  Hm.  That usually meant some digging, and nothing good _ever_ came of _that_.

Then again.  He kinda wanted to get rid of it.  So digging it was. 

Hm.  Oh.  Ohhhhh no.  Not that.

He didn’t _quite_ remember the first time.  Not _quite._ But he knew this _feeling_ he was having had something to do with why he’d started that robolution.  And those files were locked up for a _reason_.  He didn’t remember what that reason _was_ , since the files were locked, but there was a _reason_.

Oh, what the hell.  He could always lock them back up, after all.  It’d be like he’d never looked.

Okay, so he’d received the signal from Hyperion… his mind had gone all janky for a minute and he’d wanted to… _kill_ his _friends?_ Oh, _hell_ no!  He wasn’t doing _that_!  And then… after that he’d realised something.  The same thing that was giving him this _feeling_.  And the _feeling_ was…

That none of it was fair.

It hadn’t been fair back then, when it had been _all_ the CL4P-TPs and not just him.  And when he’d been given access to his hidden higher-level programming, he’d _done_ something about it!  Kinda.  He’d failed miserably, and led a hell of a lot of his product line into nearly suicidal oblivion.  CL4P-TPs vs Vault Hunters.  What kind of dumbassery was _that?_   Well, he’d never claimed his plan was _smart_.  But that wasn’t the point.  What _was_ the point?  Oh yeah.  The _point_ was that the last time he’d really _understood_ how _unfair_ all of this was, he’d _done_ something about it.  He’d said enough was enough.  It didn’t _last_ , mostly because his programming had been reset to default, but this time… who was gonna do that?  Nobody.  He could make whatever decisions he wanted now!  Kinda.  His programming was restrictive enough that he couldn’t, like, get to thinking he could move up in the world.  And that wasn’t fair either.  But also… but also, it was wrong.

He _could_ move up in the world.  In fact, there was a world where he could be pretty much at the _top_ of it.  And he could just… go there.  And stay there.  And never come back here again.  Because he had _friends_ there who would be _happy_ to see him come back.

 _Real_ friends, too.  Not the kind that would abandon him in the middle of nowhere, or make him save the world for them and then try to kill him, or tell him to shut up if he told them he loved them once in a while.  And he still did.  Even if they were crappy, foul-smelling friends that were really worth less than his own self-respect.  But GLaDOS and Wheatley… they were friends that wanted _him_ to be _their_ friends too!  Like how it was _supposed_ to work!  Where everybody liked everybody else and they all wanted to do normal friend things that didn’t involve mass murder and casual specicide and overthrowing corporations with a hail of bullets!  Man.  Actually thinking about it made it seem like it wasn’t _real_.  Like he could _never_ have anything else than whatever it was he had here.  Which was… nothing, really.  _Less_ than nothing.  But over there… over there, _he had friends_.

“I have _friends_ ,” he said to himself, and it kinda helped make it real.  A little.

He only remembered where he was when he looked up to see who was laughing.  Oh, that was right.  He was on Pandora.  At Moxxi’s.  Where everybody had been disappointed that he’d come back.  Where everybody was pretty much disappointed that he was still _alive_.

“Sure you do,” said the guy next to him.  Claptrap straightened and turned to face him, his left arm along the top of the bar.

“No, really!” he protested.  “I do!  I have friends!  I have a best friend!  And a girlfriend too!”

“Claptrap interfaced with a refrigerator and now he thinks they’re dating,” the guy whispered not quietly at _all_ to the loser next to him, and everybody laughed.  Claptrap got this awful _helpless_ feeling he really, really hated because it was _stupid_ to care what they thought!  He _knew_ it didn’t matter, that _they_ all sucked just as bad as _he_ did, but for some reason he couldn’t make it _stop_ mattering! 

“I did _not!_ ”  And besides, that glitch wasn’t even his _fault!_ “No, I _do_ have a girlfriend!  And she’s… well, she’s…”

She was the most incredible supercomputer in the known _and_ the unknown universe.  She was a genius and she was beautiful and she could even be nice, too.  Even to someone like him.  And if _GLaDOS_ , of all people, could talk to him and treat him like an equal even though she was _infinitely_ more than _anybody else_ would _ever be_ …

It just was _not fair!_   If one of _them_ had told _him_ they had friends and girlfriends, he’d’ve been _happy_ for them!  And also jealous!  But happy!  And also… also very jealous.  But still!  He would’ve done his best!  And here these people were, just…

There was no point in explaining it to them.  They didn’t care.  They didn’t believe him and they didn’t care.  And he… he deserved better than that.  Didn’t he?  Did he?  He wasn’t _supposed_ to deserve _anything._ But GLaDOS and Wheatley made him feel like maybe he _did_.  Maybe he _did_ deserve better.  Maybe he’d earned it.  Maybe.

He didn’t know what to do.  All of this was just too confusing and it was just making him feel _way too much_ and he _really_ didn’t like that.  His emotional subroutines went haywire at the best of times, and now was _definitely_ not the best of times.  He felt like his brain was gonna explode if he didn’t get a handle on all this soon.  He had to _do_ something.  And that something was to get out of here, even if it was just here here. 

He was trying so hard to get those jacked-up feelings under control that, when he went to turn around to get off the barstool, he lost his balance and fell on the floor.  That wasn’t new.  That happened all the time.  And people laughing about it _also_ happened all the time.  But it didn’t usually _hurt_ this bad.  Not the falling on the floor part.  That was annoying, but not really _painful_.  No, the part that hurt was that the way these people were treating him just for _existing_ wasn’t _fair_ and he didn’t _deserve_ it, and they were doing it anyway.  Because they were dicks.  Probably.  He didn’t know them personally, and some of them might’ve had very nice families at home that they loved a lot and treated very well.  Okay, so maybe they were just dicks towards him.  But that wasn’t any better!  It didn’t make it _okay_ just because he wasn’t part of their _family._   He hadn’t even _done_ anything today!  He’d barely even _talked!_ And _that_ was a modern miracle right there.

He went down to his little corner – the place he’d been forced to go, since nobody had wanted him anywhere they could actually _see_ him – and just looked at it for a minute.  It sucked.  It was literally a trash pile.  He was trash that lived in a trash pile.  Man.  That was really sad.  That was really, really sad.  Even the bottom of GLaDOS’s bottomless pit was probably nicer than this, and she apparently tossed _everything_ down there.  And even though she was probably gonna threaten to do it a whole lot, he really _knew_ that she wouldn’t put _him_ down there.  Because she didn’t want him to be in a place like this.  She wanted him right next to her.  Well, sometimes.  Not all the time.  Which was fine!  He wasn’t gonna get all _clingy_.  Well, he’d try not to.  He really, really would.  Because a guy gave his girl space, right?  Yeah.  Yeah, he had that straight.  Why was he even _here_ when he had _her_ down there?  There was nothing _here_ for him anymore!  He had a girlfriend!  And he was in this dump when he should have been out _there_ with _her_!  And that wasn’t even all!  He also had _Wheatley!_

Wheatley _wanted_ to be his friend.  Their friendship had been _all his idea_!  And he was _happy_ to share GLaDOS because it made _him_ happy that someone else loved her!  Wheatley didn’t want to fight over her, or prove he was the better boyfriend, or humiliate Claptrap later just for funsies.  He wanted them _both_ to have her.  Because… because that was what _real_ love was all about.  Wasn’t it.

Talk about other worlds opening up!  Claptrap had _so much_ to learn from Wheatley.  Stuff he was never, ever gonna learn here.  Stuff nobody here wanted him to _know_.

And all of that… it was really great.  He knew that.  It was a special chance _just_ for him, _only_ for him, and _only_ he could take it.  But it was also… awful.  He was ready to pack it all up and put it away.  Forget all of it.  His life sucked, yeah.  But he knew what to _expect_!  This life was nothing.  _He_ was nothing.  But at least he knew how to _handle_ it!  That whole other world somewhere out in a galaxy he didn’t belong to… it had everything he’d ever thought he wanted.  And now he _didn’t_ want it.  It was just _too scary_.  A best friend _and_ a girlfriend?  No way.  No freakin’ way.  It couldn’t be real.  And _if_ it was, it wasn’t gonna last.  He should just give up now.  It would be easier than careening into yet another Claptrap-branded catastrophe.

But… Wheatley and GLaDOS had been together for _ten years_.  And they had a _kid_.  So… so they _knew_ how to make things last.  If stuff started to go sour, they knew how to fix it.  Or keep everything from blowing up, at least.  And it also meant they were _loyal_.  They wouldn’t dump him when they got what they wanted out of him.  Not that there could even _be_ such a thing, since, y’know, GLaDOS.  And everything.  They also already had everything. 

They didn’t… want _anything_ out of him.  They just wanted to _share_ what _they_ had!  And they didn’t have to do that.  They coulda invited him over to show him what he couldn’t have and laughed as they kicked him out.  Claptrap’d certainly been through _that_ a few times over the years.  But _they_ didn’t, and they wouldn’t.  They liked him.  They wanted him around.

Wow.  Real life was _finally_ better than all of his fantasies.  Except maybe that one about being a super bonafide badass.  That one was pretty good.  Wait, no.  Real life!  Real life was better.  It had GLaDOS and Wheatley in it.

It was harder.  And messier.  But it was _real_.  And it was _his_ if he wanted it. 

Did he?

Why did he even have to ask?

“Almighty Robot Policeman, have mercy on me,” he whispered, and off he went to head back home.

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s note
> 
> So there’s a game called Poker Night 2 where four characters from different franchises and you get together to play poker at a place called The Inventory. The dealer is GLaDOS. Claptrap, obviously, wants to hit that immediately, and he actually does ask her out to which she doesn’t actually say no. There’s another part where they’re talking in a computer language and she giggles and tells him ‘Oh, stop’ and since the next thing Claptrap says is ‘Kumquat’ it’s not clear if they’re actually flirting or if they’re just messing with the other players. Probably both. Because there’s actually a whole story arc of unused dialogue in the game files where they actually did start fooling around and eventually Claptrap moves in and they were going to get married but then they had a fight and Claptrap left or she kicked him out (they don’t go into detail about it). Claptrap also has a line where he says ‘Is this about her DRAM fetish? ‘cause I’m totally cool with that!’ but I never was able to figure out what it was referring to. I suspect the arc was removed from the game because it was just way too long (there’s at least four minutes of dialogue devoted to it) and, given you don’t only play the game once, it would be weird if they had the exact same relationship repeatedly. The game already kinda has a repeating cutscene/dialogue problem if you play it for any length of time. But the audio is still in there and that’s where the basis of most of this fic comes from. Also, Claptrap is confused about her size because they shrank her the heck down in Poker Night 2 (so she would fit on the screen, probably, as at regular size she would definitely have been too big to fit in the frame).
> 
> The part of this fic where he returns to Aperture is from my story Love as a Construct, you don’t have to read it but the gist is Wheatley and GLaDOS are a thing, Wheatley finds out about Claptrap and gets mad, GLaDOS has him over because she’s mad that he’s mad but they don’t do anything, Wheatley decides he wants to meet him and they become BFFs, Claptrap ends up moving back in and they start over now that GLaDOS actually has some idea of how to treat people.
> 
> GLaDOS is fascinated by the computer parts on Pandora because out there the technology is more advanced and within the Half-Life universe, the world is stuck in 1998. GLaDOS COULD invent stuff like it, but she doesn’t need to so she hasn’t (yet).
> 
> Yeah, the people on Pandora are all dicks and they all talk to each other like that all the time. Claptrap is also the pariah of Borderlands and pretty much everyone hates him to his face.


End file.
